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BOOK REVIEWS |
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Read
recent reviews of poetry and short story collections,
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memoirs, and nonfiction from the pages of New Letters
magazine. |
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(For review
guidelines click
here.) |
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See below for
reviews of books by Brenda Miller, John D'Agata, and Clive
Fisher (about Hart Crane). |
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From Issue 70:2 Spring 2004 |
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Here in the Midwest, by H. L. Hix |
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Review of: |
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In the Middle of the
Middle West: Literary Nonfiction from the Heartland,
ed.
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Becky Bradway. Indiana University Press, 2003. |
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Seated once with a large group during dinner at a
conference, my wife was asked by an East Coast native
where she was from. Her answer evoked a further
question. “Kansas,” he mused. “Isn’t that one of those
square states?” Surely every resident of the Midwest has
some similar anecdote to tell of the utter nonexistence
of the Midwest in the minds of citizens of coastal
states. My own favorite occurred about two years ago,
when I e-mailed a friend who had been born and raised in
New York City, to tell her I was moving from one end of
the Midwest, Kansas City, to the other, Cleveland. She
asked in her reply if that meant I would be closer to
New York.
Asserting the existence
of the Midwest is the goal of Becky Bradway’s anthology
In the Middle of the Middle West. Unlike the
doubting (and self-doubting) fiction whose title it
echoes (William Gass’ In the Heart of the Heart of
the Country), Bradway’s is a self-confident
collection that seeks to validate the Midwest against
its neglect by the East Coast publishing and political
industries and the West Coast popular-culture industry—a
neglect the effect of which is less to portray the
Midwest as terra incognita than simply to exclude
it from the world. If a common thread runs through the
collection, it finds summary not in the culminating
platitude of Bradway’s not-at-all-helpful introduction
(“Even if you are not from this place, it’s true—we’re
all from the same place”), but in Janet Wondra’s
attribution of a zen-like mystery to the Midwest: “The
region sits in the middle of the country, in the middle
of the continent, silent, keeping its own counsel.” All
the writers’ portraits of the Midwest recognize
themselves as partial; none thinks it has comprehended
the entirety or essence of the Midwest.
Bradway organizes the
book along two axes: geographically, as a collection of
works by writers who live (or have lived) in the
Midwest, writing about the Midwest; and generically, as
a collection of “literary nonfiction.” The question
whether geography and genre have commonalities that
motivate applying the two of them together does not
run through the book as a common thread—none of the
essays, including the editor’s introduction, asks if the
Midwest and literary nonfiction resemble one another—but
it does brood as a spirit over the collection.
The
variety of the essays, manifest to Bradway as surprise
(“What I got [when I solicited these essays] wasn’t what
I expected”), occurs at least in part because of one
commonality between the categories, namely indeterminacy
of reference. It is hard to know what either “Midwest”
or “literary nonfiction” names. “Midwest” sounds like
it should mean “in the middle of the west,” that is, at
the center of the region designated as the West; or that
it should be 12 time zones away from the “Middle East.”
In usage, of course, it means midway between East and
West, which means it works by negation: “the Midwest”
names that which is neither East nor West. (Nor South:
Biloxi shares its longitude with Chicago, but it’s not
in the Midwest.) Bradway’s book focuses heavily on
Illinois (her home) and Indiana (home of the press that
published the book).
"Literary
nonfiction” is hardly less problematic than
“Midwest.” “Literary” seems both to imply a level
of quality (it’s “literary” because it’s not
shallow: “literary” as opposed to “popular”) and a
level of artifice (it’s “literary” because it has
character and plot: “literary” as opposed to
“scholarly”). “Nonfiction” returns us to definition
by negation: It is whatever is not a novel
or short story (or poem or play). Indeterminacy
isn’t that big a deal in regard to “Midwest,” but
“literary nonfiction” sounds like a euphemism. (Or,
to be cynical, a lie.) The essay has been a
problematic genre at least since Montaigne, if not
since Cicero, and calling it “literary nonfiction”
only gives the problem a new name and sponsors its
acceptance into creative-writing programs, as if
this made the problem go away. In fact, its greasy
surface, the oxymoronic incoherence it wants you not
to observe, makes “literary nonfiction” sound rather
like “reality TV.”
Geography and genre
do not harmonize on the matter of variety. The book
asserts a wide range of experience in the Midwest
but does not match that purported range by the range
of approaches taken to write about the experience.
One mode of uniformity: To judge by these essays,
“literary nonfiction” means “memoir.” Nearly every
essay features a remembrance of things past. The
pattern starts in the first essay, in which Stuart
Dybek reminisces nostalgically about a persistent
chicken he and his wife adopted while living in a
rented Iowa farmhouse in graduate school. To the
ordeals caused by the chicken attach recollections
of Snyder, the landlord, who calls Dybek “Sturt,” of
Iowa’s blustery cold weather, and so on. Dybek’s
essay establishes the manner of the whole.
The exceptions in this
collection prove more interesting than the rule, and in
respect to reminiscence the exceptions move beyond more
or less self-centered nostalgia to a more biblical
lamentation: a state of awe, of reverence over the loss
of something larger. Mary Troy’s meditation begins at a
personal, even private, occasion, a party commemorating
the first anniversary of her father’s death, but quickly
opens out onto the neighborhood in which Troy and her
husband bought their first house, a hundred-year-old
house on the south side of St. Louis. Their experiences
include enduring neighbors who liked to shoot guns, and
one of whom eventually shot his girlfriend; incompetent
city government; repeated break-ins; the death of the
boy next door. Eventually, Troy comes to understand in
a visceral way, as depression and a physical necessity
to move, that, just as she had been helpless to ease or
prevent her father’s death, so she and her husband could
do nothing to ease the death of their neighborhood—the
community, or the individuals in it. Mary Swander
celebrates (in exquisitely beautiful prose) the dignity
of the Amish and their principled approach to sustaining
community and the land it depends on, lamenting by
implication the violence the rest of American culture is
doing to itself and the earth. Doug Hesse’s meditation
on his father’s mortality also laments the death of
small towns and small-town life.
Bradway’s book is
conservative in a manner that resembles the conservatism
typically attributed to the Midwest. In this regard
also, the exceptions prove more engaging than the rule.
Two of the essays establish voices really divergent from
the others. Only Curtis White’s contribution is in any
way “experimental.” Excerpted from America’s Magic
Mountain, a book that White’s contributor’s note
says is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive, it presents
itself in the guise of a case study by Peter Self, M.C.,
that announces as its thesis the view that “contrary to
the common perception that ritual is of no account . . .
in the chaotic environment of the alcoholic household,
we have found that alcoholic families in fact do have
very well defined rituals.” The reader develops a
distrust of the narrator until that suspicion becomes an
understanding that the case study is not the case study
it purports to be, and ultimately learns to read the
essay as a fiction. The other exception occurs when
Ricardo Cortez Cruz and Rodney B. Cruz write about
growing up as members of a minority group in a small
town in the Midwest. In an often white, mostly
middle-class soundscape, this voice from “the other side
of the tracks”—the side more often talked about or
talked down to than allowed to speak for
itself—resonates with clarity and power.
Another exception,
Robert Grindy’s “Desperately Seeking Blue Mound,” rises
from the rest because it questions the book’s own
categories. Grindy decides that being from California
and living in Illinois is not so remarkable, that “most
of my California life” was “not much different from what
I see around me in Illinois” because he lived/lives in
rural areas of both states. The regional differences
that carry cultural weight (the ones that make a
difference to one’s way of life) are not defined by
relation to the coasts but by relation to major cities.
“Chicago kids have much more in common with kids in Los
Angeles than in downstate Illinois,” Grindy says.
“Certainly regionalism still lives, but in many ways the
labels ‘urban,’ ‘suburban,’ and ‘rural’ define cultural
differences in the United States more accurately than
‘Eastern,’ ‘Midwestern,’ ‘Southern,’ or ‘Western.’”
A number of the essays
present faint praise, a kind of
it’s-not-so-bad-here-as-all-that defense of aspects of
the Midwest. James McManus defends his choice to live
in suburban rather than urban Chicago, against the
assumption of his professorial colleagues that urban
life carries an innate cultural superiority. Philip
Graham develops a grudging appreciation for the bizarre
architecture of a friend’s parents’ farmhouse and its
odd indoor swimming pool, “smack dab in the middle of
some of the flattest flatland” imaginable, a flatness he
had “dreaded.” Robert Hellenga says life in a small
Midwestern college town is not as bad as you’d expect,
because “the small liberal arts college is the smallest
unit from which you can reach out to everything else in
the universe.”
“Literary nonfiction,”
that curious category, does resemble the Midwest in
certain ways: The Midwest has enjoyed fewer attempts at
explication and is therefore less well understood than
the coasts, just as literary nonfiction has been less
often explicated than poetry and fiction, and so on. It
may be just as well that the logic of Bradway’s book,
the testing of one category against another, never
receives explicit statement within the book, since that
may reflect another characteristic the two categories,
when they are most themselves, share: a modesty that
translates into tact, in which one says little, in which
one keeps, in Wondra’s words quoted earlier, one’s own
counsel.
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From
Issue 70:2 Spring 2004 |
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Women's Work: From the Kitchen to the Woods, by Catherine
Browder. |
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Review of:
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Transgressions: Stories, by Sallie Bingham.
Sarabande Books, 2002
Beulah Land, by Krista McGruder. Toby Books,
2003.
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The health and safekeeping
of the short story has for some time rested in the hands
of small presses. Given the disinterest of large
publishing houses, one can only feel gratitude that so
many capable and diverse writers find their way into
print. Such is certainly the case with veteran writer
Sallie Bingham’s Transgressions, and newcomer Krista
McGruder’s powerful Beulah Land. Adding to our pleasure
is the fact that the authors’ gender is all these two
collections have in common.
Bingham’s skill lies with
the small, intimate and closely observed details of
domestic life, executed with a light touch and a
detached air. The stories often hinge on a common thing:
a splinter in the heel, a defunct water pump, a piece of
fruit or a bed. The setting is frequently the Southwest,
Santa Fe in particularly, but exterior landscapes feel
incidental in a Bingham story. Although much of the
volume focuses on women in late middle-age, several of
her most successful, and curious, tales involve men. In
the moving “The One True Place,” the arrival of a
troubled teenager, who will soon disrupt an established
gay relationship, is signaled by a gift of cherries. In
another, the elderly and rakish eponymous artist of
“Benjamin” misbehaves throughout an event staged in his
honor.
Among the women-focused tales, the middle-aged narrator
of “The Pump” senses the loss of a potential
relationship with the equanimity that only age can
bring. “I know the lack of an engagement of the evening
means nothing” she says. “I am at ease and easy alone.
Even the loss of companionship and the early heat of sex
mean very little. What is breaking my heart is the loss
of the layer under words that bind two people together.”
In another, the marriage in “Loving” finds nourishment
on many levels. When the wife, and narrator, makes plans
to follow the exact route of her husband’s long-ago
Greek trip, the very marital love that would allow her
this freedom causes her to abort the plan.
Bingham has one quirk, however: a
tendency to wrap up an engaging story with breath-taking
speed and appended “insight.” Nevertheless, a wise and
mature voice informs these 11 stories of diminishing
possibilities, sexual transgression, and loss; and we
leave them satisfied.
If the stories in Transgressions recall Japanese sumie
drawings, then Krista McGruder’s Beulah Land is like
encountering a vast Bierstadt landscape. Or more
precisely, landscapes. McGruder takes her readers from
the Ozarks to New York City, from the Dakotas to Kansas
to Key West. Yet each story remains completely
self-assured in its location. Although new to print,
McGruder is an accomplished and instinctive storyteller,
whose rich language, free-ranging imagination and daring
not only satisfy but thrill.
With the exception of one gratuitously improbable urban
tale, the 11 stories in this volume convince and
challenge. Her difficult, often abrasive people linger
in the reader’s mind. Here are a few highlights:
• In “Counting Coup,”
a young lawyer, visiting her stubborn Indian
grandmother, attempts to ferret out a grim family
secret.
• In “The Bereavement of Eugene Wheeler,” an
undertaker triumphs over weather and small-town
propriety to bury a convicted murderer in a public
cemetery.
• During a year of terrible drought and dying
cattle, the tough daughter of the one-armed farmer
in “Divination” arranges against his will for a well
to be drilled.
• Elegiac in tone, “The Southernmost Point” follows
the conclusion of a May-December relationship
against the sun and water and fishing boats of Key
West
The title novella is
something of a tour de force, in spite of a questionable
second-person narration and some portentous passages
worthy of Cormac McCarthy. “Between coasts,” it begins,
“a seventy-foot Jesus statue shadows the Ozark hollow
town of Beulah Land. Trees flourish up the mountainside
as if positioned on risers by a master gardener,
exposing only the crown where an expanse of fertilized
grass encircles Christ.”
Granddad Buell has found a
calling saving wildlife from ruthless developers,
including a preacher. His granddaughter and narrator,
Amanita Buell, is an athletic and uncompromising child
who follows in his path, returning to Arkansas as a
terminally ill adult to finish his work. Throughout, the
Jesus statue—an ironic emblem of intrusive
change—watches with unseeing eyes over the violent
playing out of family loss, vengeance, and honor.
None of these summaries
does justice to the complex characters and situations,
the fertile imagination, or dark humor found in this
collection. Beulah Land is haunting and genuinely
ambitious (in the best sense of this misunderstood
word), offering short fiction enthusiasts a brave new
voice to follow. |
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For
previous book reviews, click here.
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